Purchase
The Life of Jerome Robbins
Broadway
November 2006
On Sale: November 21, 2006
Featuring: Jerome Robbins
688 pages
ISBN: 0767904206
EAN: 8670767904209
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
From the author of the acclaimed Everybody Was So
Young, the definitive and major biography of the great
choreographer and Broadway legend Jerome Robbins
To some, Jerome Robbins was a demanding perfectionist, a
driven taskmaster, a theatrical visionary; to others, he was
a loyal friend, a supportive mentor, a generous and
entertaining companion and colleague. Born Jerome Rabinowitz
in New York City in 1918, Jerome Robbins repudiated his
Jewish roots along with his name only to reclaim them with
his triumphant staging of Fiddler on the Roof. A
self-proclaimed homosexual, he had romances or relationships
with both men and women, some famous--like Montgomery Clift
and Natalie Wood--some less so. A resolutely unpolitical
man, he was forced to testify before Congress at the height
of anti-Communist hysteria. A consummate entertainer, he
could be paralyzed by shyness; nearly infallible
professionally, he was conflicted, vulnerable, and torn by
self-doubt. Guarded and adamantly private, he was an
inveterate and painfully honest journal writer who confided
his innermost thoughts and aspirations to a remarkable
series of diaries and memoirs. With ballets like Dances
at a Gathering, Afternoon of a Faun, and The
Concert, he humanized neoclassical dance; with musicals
like On the Town, Gypsy, and West Side
Story, he changed the face of theater in America.
In the pages of this definitive biography, Amanda Vaill
takes full measure of the complicated, contradictory genius
who was Jerome Robbins. She re-creates his childhood as the
only son of Russian Jewish immigrants; his apprenticeship as
a dancer and Broadway chorus gypsy; his explosion into
prominence at the age of twenty-five with the ballet
Fancy Free and its Broadway incarnation, On the
Town; and his years of creative dominance in both
theater and dance. She brings to life his colleagues and
friends--from Leonard Bernstein and George Balanchine to
Robert Wilson and Robert Graves--and his loves and lovers.
And she tells the full story behind some of Robbins's most
difficult episodes, such as his testimony before the House
Un-American Activities Committee and his firing from the
film version of West Side Story.
Drawing on thousands of pages of documents from Robbins's
personal and professional papers, to which she was granted
unfettered access, as well as on other archives and hundreds
of interviews, Somewhere is a riveting narrative of a
life lived onstage, offstage, and backstage. It is also an
accomplished work of criticism and social history that
chronicles one man's phenomenal career and places it
squarely in the cultural ferment of a time when New York
City was truly "a helluva town."
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